For a long time I’ve been putting off conducting open heart surgery….but this past week I decided that it was about time I pulled out the scalpel and made an incision. Thankfully, not on a human but on a platform I developed.

Like many things in life I've been procrastinating about doing this big slab of work for several years. I’d kept running into problems because the work wasn’t done but there always seemed to be some convoluted work around that allowed me to just make things work.

Finally, in a fit of frustration I took the plunge and began restructuring the foundations of an application that literally process tens of millions of requests each day. It was like looking at a great big ball of string and the more I pulled the more the string seemed to resist.

Knots would form and quickly become mini-projects in themselves that needed to be resolved before the bigger issues could be addressed. Numerous times I completely broke the entire system and found myself tracking down some esoteric piece of code written three years ago. Grrrrr!

I was looking out my study window this morning and enjoying watching a family of birds as mum responded to the constant chirping of a youngster with a tasty morsel. All at once two slightly larger birds from a different variety swept in and began attacking the youngster.

The parents defended their child and a few friends flew in to help drive the bullies off. It wasn’t very pleasant viewing, but it reminded me of a number of things about the behaviour of some humans.

Bullies come in all shapes and sizes, but their ultimate goal is to control those around them. When they act alone they pick on the perceived weak or a person that is in no position to fight back. When they act as a group they will inevitably demonstrate their power and influence publicly, so they can intimidate others into submission.

I’ve just been trying to debug a pretty complex program. One screen displayed the error logs, another the database changes while yet another the actual code. For some stupid reason, nothing appeared in my browser when I run the application……it’s safe to say that I'm pulling my hair out in frustration!

It was then that it dawned on me…..you moron! I’d forgotten to save my code. Yep, the most obvious of solutions lay withering on the vine of my single-minded focus. A simple control-S saw everything instantly display as it should and my universe come into alignment….well, almost anyway.

I know of very few people that don’t suffer from stress and fewer still that haven’t been massively stressed at some time during their life. So over the years, what have I learned about handling stress?

When I was training for my private pilot's license, my flying instructor explained to me a simple principle about how to handle stress in the cockpit. He said there may be a time when the workload increases to the point where you become incredibly stressed and find your decision making suffers.

I must admit that I thought that could never happen to me, after all, I’m a smart guy so my instructor must have been thinking about other people. How many times have you listened to someone sharing some wisdom born out of experience only to think they were talking to someone else?

I can’t stand the term “networking”. It really iterates me when I hear people talk about “great network opportunities” when they refer to a conference. The reason I don’t like the term is that it’s completely self-centered. It’s all about what you can get out of something or someone.

How many times have you been in a conversation with someone where the only reason they want to get to know you is because of who you work for or the position you hold? You’re merely the stepping stone for them to sell some product or service. They actually don’t care about you and developing a friendship is the furthest thing from their thinking.

Yes, in business we all do transactions with one another but there is a right way and a wrong way to treat people along the journey. Networking is all about getting something…..I think we should flip the model on its head and work out what we can give.